sicetaitsimple wrote:Exnihiloest wrote:All the other answers confirm that the weight of the plane is well transferred to the ground. We have to stop the bad faith.
OK, OK, you're right,
of course the atmosphere below distributes the resulting additional weight over a large floor area
absolutely
Mr Simple wrote:But since by design an airplane in flight at a constant altitude has almost zero weight (otherwise it would go up or down constantly), it's not dramatic....
The weight of an airplane is never zero.
Surprisingly, however, the weight of an airplane decreases with altitude, and even tends towards zero if it moves infinitely far from the Earth.
However, as a first approximation, the weight is more or less constant in the interval of altitudes usually reached by an airplane.
You develop far too many notions of "apparent weight" and other "zero weight" which are quite scabrous.
Better to come back to a balance of forces on a specific system, and clearly identify all the mechanical systems that interact.
The case of an airplane is already not so simple!